Hijacked: Team Psyche hit the esoterica!

The original plan for today was to meet Dave, Paul & Sarah up at El Falcó. But having climbed virtually every route on the main face and fearing the weekend crowds I thought I'd treat the visitors to some local esoterica instead ;-)

So we ended up at a different Arbolí sector - Forat del Serratell. This place I'd checked out quite a long time ago but had never actually climbed at. Today was the day.

Energy levels were high; you could just smell the psyche.



A hive of activity. Dave in particular was raving about the place. In fact, he only managed the one route - this crag has that intimidation factor so rare on 15m high cliffs.

Seriously though, the crag was actually much better than first impressions suggested and well worth a day.
Tash here on one of many attempts at the starting moves of a brilliant 6c 'Grüner herbst'.

Dutch climber Jorgus van Daamieenan on the highly praised 'Harissa' (7a).

I was on a mission to climb every half-decent route at the crag and succeeded with all the onsights up to 7b - the highlight of these was the above route 'Harissa'. The rock on the two harder routes at the crag (both 7c) didn't lend itself to on-sighting very well, being completely chalkless and very complex with loads of small holds all over the place. After a short-lived on-sight go at one of them (falling off the crux trying to use the obvious-looking two-finger pocket that turned out to be worse than the half-pad mono just next to it that you actually had to pull on!), I managed it 2nd go. I got on the other 7c right at the end of the day when I was tired. This one felt even harder, with loads of quite powerful moves off small painful pockets, sidepulls and crimps. I worked out the sequence but was too tired for a redpoint. Not sure I'd go back to the crag just for this route, but maybe if I'm passing. Good to climb at another new sector though.